How To Get Coworkers to Step-up Their Service

A question I often receive from customer service professionals is "How do I get my coworkers to improve their service?

It can be frustrating to feel like you are giving it your all while colleague settle for mediocrity (or worse).

Getting your peers to change is tricky. Approach a colleague the wrong way and you risk harming the relationship. Do nothing at all and things will likely stay the same.

That doesn't mean you are powerless. Here are three strategies you can try.

Image source: BigStockPhoto

Image source: BigStockPhoto

Be the Model

"Who was it?!" the woman demanded. "Who is making us look bad?!"

I was facilitating a customer service workshop and was sharing the results of a secret shopping test I had conducted the night before. Four out of five employees I had shopped didn't use any of the company's service standards in my interaction.

This particular employee was incensed. She wanted to know who it was because she felt embarrassed to get such a poor report.

Sadly, she was one of the four people who I had visited who performed poorly. She didn't recognize me because she was too busy chatting with a coworker when I had been her customer the night before.

If you want your coworkers to improve, start by taking a long, hard, figurative look in the mirror.

You can't expect your colleagues to step up their collective game if you aren't doing the same thing. This means you need to be the model of outstanding customer service.

Aside from giving you more credibility with your peers, it’s inspiring to others when they see someone else going the extra mile. It creates subtle but powerful positive peer pressure for them to serve at a higher level.

 

Identify Shared Challenges

High performing teams work together to solve problems.

For example, a Tier 2 technical support team handled issues that were beyond the scope of expertise for the Tier 1 team. One problem was Tier 1 reps often unnecessarily transferred calls to the Tier 2 team that they should have resolved on their own.

Rather than build silos and cast blame, members of both teams met to identify the top reasons calls were transferred and then mark which ones could be prevented. A Tier 2 rep then put together a job aid that showed Tier 1 reps how to handle those issues on their own.

This approach solved a problem, but it also fostered a sense of teamwork between members of both teams.

Another opportunity is to share common issues with your boss.

Many employees assume that bosses are apathetic toward poor service if they don't take any action to correct it. My research indicates there might be another reason: most employees don’t pass along customer complaints!

The idea isn't to tattle on your coworkers. 

The point is to tell your boss about the top customer complaints you hear, along with some ideas or suggestions for improvement. It might be a policy that customers don't like or a common product defect.

Whatever it is, sharing customer insight with your boss may give him or her needed information to enlist the entire team in taking action.

 

Ask For Advice

One customer service professional, we'll call him David, wrote to me and explained that he was 26 and had just a few years of experience. He explained that he was the youngest person on his team, and most of his peers were 40 years old or older.

My suggestion to David was to approach his more experienced colleagues and ask them for advice on handling a particular customer service challenge.

Why? Two reasons.

First, asking a coworker for advice is a sign of respect. It shows them you value their wisdom and experience. And that respect makes them more likely to respect you back.

Second, it's human nature that we are our own most credible source of information. If I ask you for a suggestion on handling a particular situation, you'll probably give me a good answer but you'll also be more likely to remember to take your own advice the next time.

 

Conclusion

In many of the organizations I wrote about in The Service Culture Handbook, leaders cultivate a culture of positive peer pressure. 

Coworkers recognize each other for great performance. They cover for each other without question, which creates a social need for reciprocity (I've got your back, you've got mine). Veteran employees guide new hires to help them succeed too.

You can do your part by trying some of the techniques outlined above. Here's one more bonus technique:

Take a moment to recognize a coworker for doing something well.

Chances are, they'll appreciate you letting them know their contributions are valued. They'll be more likely to do it again. And, there's a chance they'll be a bit more receptive when you have some constructive feedback to share!

Lessons from The Overlook: Know Your Financials

Note: Lessons from The Overlook is a monthly update on lessons learned from owning a vacation rental property in the Southern California mountain town of Idyllwild. It's a hands-on opportunity to apply some of the techniques I advise my clients to use. You can find past updates here.

Many customer service leaders tell me they struggle with financials.

Things like margin, variable costs, and fixed costs are a mystery. Capital expense doesn't make any sense at all. Cost centers are confounding.

This makes it difficult to ask for money. 

You might want to invest in new technology, hire more staff, or boost wages to improve retention. Knowing the cost isn't enough. Fluffy platitudes about investing in service won't get you there, either. 

You need to convince executives there's a financial benefit to spending that money. 

I can relate. My wife, Sally, and I wanted to turn the garage at our vacation rental property into a game room. But first, we had to run the numbers.

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

Why We Wanted a Game Room

We thought it would be a great addition for our guests.

An analysis of similar vacation homes in the area revealed that guests generally looked for a few benefits:

  • A well-equipped kitchen

  • Expansive views

  • A spa

  • A deck

  • Walking distance to town

Our property, The Overlook, already has all of those features except for walking distance to town. Pretty difficult to change that one.

A few rentals had a game room, which many guests called out as an added benefit, though not the primary reason they booked. Most game rooms had a pool table in a kitschy room that looked like somebody's basement from the 80s. 

We thought we could do better.

The Overlook has a detached single car garage. Guests don't expect to park in a garage, so we thought we could make better use of the space. Our vision was to finish off the garage and put in a ping pong table. 

Truth be told, we also really wanted a ping pong table to enjoy ourselves. 

 

Running the Numbers

First, it's important to know exactly how much adding a game room would cost. 

We had a few contractors come out to give us estimates. It wasn't pretty. The garage needed a new roof, a new side door, and new windows. The roll-up garage door was unsightly. The floor wasn't level. 

Total price tag, including a ping pong table, was $16,500.

Now that we knew the cost, we had to calculate the return. What would we gain financially from having a game room.

We talked to our property manager. She told us that in her experience, game rooms were nice added features, but it would be difficult to justify a rate increase on that alone. 

This actually jibed with our earlier analysis that guests liked game rooms, but it wasn't a primary factor when booking a rental.

If we couldn't get a rate increase, could we get more bookings? 

There are two factors that might drive this:

  • The game room could be a tie-breaker between two similar properties

  • Guests might be more likely to return if they enjoyed the game room

We didn't have a lot of data here, having only owned The Overlook since last October. So we took a guess.

The Overlook was already booked most weekends during the busy winter season. A game room couldn't improve upon that. But perhaps we could gain two extra rentals during the summer. 

Here's how that works out:

  • Rate: $325 for two nights, $275 for each additional night. 

  • Average stay: 2.5 nights 

  • Total gain: $975

Would you spend $16,500 to gain $975 per year? Wait, the math gets worse.

Our nightly rate includes the cleaning fee. We also have to pay our management company and some other miscellaneous fees. That means our take on the $975 is really about $500.

Here's our payback calculation:

$16,500 ÷ $500 = 33

This means it will take us 33 years for the game room to pay off. Suddenly, that game room seems like a terrible business decision.

 

Apply This Lesson to Your Business

Let's step through what we did to run the numbers. You can apply the same lesson to an investment you want to make in your own business.

Step 1: Identify the costs. Know exactly what you're getting into. For instance, if you want to add staff, the cost isn't just their wage. It's the cost of employment taxes, benefits, equipment, etc. Costs are almost always underestimated.

Step 2: Identify the financial benefits. Do your homework to get an accurate estimate.  Many leaders make the mistake of making up numbers without doing their research. Those estimates are almost always too optimistic. For The Overlook, we analyzed the competition and talked to our experienced property manager who oversees more than 40 properties. 

Step 3: Calculate Your Return. The easiest way to do this is to divide the cost by the gain. This will tell you the amount of time it will take for that investment to pay off. Hint: executives usually want to see unplanned investments payoff within the current fiscal year.

 

Epilogue

There's one more lesson you can take from our game room example.

You can often find money in the budget for a project that the business owner or a key executive passionately believes in, even if the financial return isn't there. This means you need to do more than just run the numbers. 

You need to get your executive emotionally committed.

In our case, we imagined epic ping pong battles with family and friends. We wanted to put barn doors on the garage that opened wide in the summer to let in the cool mountain air. Perhaps a couple of bar stools for guests to sit on while waiting for the next game.

It was a terrible investment, but we really, really wanted a ping pong table. So yeah, we did it.

Garage before

Garage before

Garage after

Garage after

An Inside Look at Amazon's Fulfillment Center Operations

Do you ever wonder how Amazon orders arrive so fast with near-perfect accuracy?

The company's operational excellent is the backbone of Amazon's reputation for outstanding customer service. I recently toured Amazon's ONT2 fulfillment center in San Bernardino, CA to get an inside look at exactly how the company does it.

Here's a quick profile of this particular facility:

  • Specializes in small and medium-sized items

  • It's the size of 28 football fields

  • Employs more than 2,500 people full-time

  • 14 million products are shipped from here

  • Amazon's oldest fulfillment center in California

The center is called ONT2 after the nearest airport (Ontario, or ONT) with the 2 designating this as the second center in the area.

The tour revealed cutting-edge technology seamlessly blended with smart logistical management. There was even a genius operational practice that was completely counterintuitive.

Pictures weren't allowed inside, but I took good notes on the process required to pick, pack, and ship your order to you.

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

The Pick Process

This is where the items you order are selected from inventory, or picked, and sent via a conveyor belt to a packing station. 

The process is initially quite counterintuitive. Inventory items are stored in seemingly random locations. One inventory bin might contain a stuffed animal, a video game, a protein shake, and a few other mismatched items. Amazon actually does call this "random stow."

Amazon puts items in all these random locations so they can assign individual pickers to tight areas. This minimizes time spent wandering around the warehouse. It also ensures that each picker has roughly the same amount of work.

Computers make this process possible. Pickers are routed by computer to maximize efficiency. (More advanced warehouses eliminate the walking entirely and have robots carry shelves of products to the pickers!)

The pickers in ONT2 push around carts with tote bins and carry around hand-held scanners. The scanner tells the picker what to pick next and where to find it. A series of three bar-code scans ensures pickers select the correct item:

  1. Scan a bar code on the tote bin.

  2. Scan a bar code on the shelf where the item is located.

  3. Scan a bar code on the item itself.

The picker can't continue until these three scans are accurately completely. Once they are, the picker's handheld scanner directs the picker to the next item which may or may not be part of the same order.

 

The Pack Process

Once filled, pickers load their totes onto conveyor belts. The belts whisk the totes to packing stations where orders are packed for shipping.

Stations are separated into single-item orders and orders with multiple items.

For single-item orders, packers are prompted by computer to select the correct size box and pack the item. A series of scans ensures the correct item goes in the correct box. 

For orders with multiple items, packers first sort items from a tote onto a cart with multiple shelves so the items from each order are grouped together. An order might have items delivered via multiple tote bins if it contains items picked by different people. The computer and scanning process keeps everything organized.

Here, I was amazed at the speed at which packers operated. They selected items, assembled boxes (which are stored flat), put in protective filler, and taped each box shut in a matter of seconds. 

 

The Ship Process

Orders are routed from packing stations down a conveyor belt to something called a SLAM machine. 

SLAM stands for:

  1. Scan

  2. Label

  3. Apply

  4. Manifest

The machine scans boxes one at a time. A shipping label is then generated and applied.

The boxes are weighed as they travel down this line and the weights are compared to the expected weight for each shipment. If the weight is off, the box is automatically pushed off the shipping line into a quality control station for inspection.

I was lucky enough to see part of Amazon's rigorous quality control methods on display. Operators detected a problem with the SLAM machine where labels were being misapplied. They immediately shut down the entire line and attempted to fix the problem. 

The operators quickly isolated the issue to one of two label applicators on the line, so the disabled to problem applicator until a technician could arrive and restarted the line.

From there, boxes are automatically routed by destination and carrier (USPS, UPS, etc.). The boxes travel along conveyor belts until they reach a warehouse bay door where workers load the boxes into waiting trucks.

 

Take Your Own Tour

Cameras aren't allowed in the fulfillment center, but I did find a news story that showed behind-the-scenes video of this process.

Amazon currently offers tours of six facilities. Check here to find a center near you and book a tour!

What Maslow's Hierarchy Says About Customer Service Employees

We've all felt beaten up by a customer.

It's part of the job. A customer is angry, maybe even unfair. Intellectually, we know they're complaining about the product, the problem, or the situation.

The attack still feels personal.

Years of pithy advice tells us to "not take it personally." That's an instinctive impossibility. We're wired to take it personally.

What happens next is interesting. Some people are able to recover, overcome the instinct, and serve the customer with a smile. Others get defensive or angry, and service quality declines rapidly for that customer and perhaps the next customer, too.

If you manage customer service employees, or you serve customers on the frontline, it's important to understand the psychology behind this. 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs gives us a clear explanation.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs

In a paper written in 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed what's now famously known as Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs.

It ranked our basic needs as humans in priority order:

  1. Physiological

  2. Safety

  3. Love and belonging

  4. Esteem

  5. Self-actualization

The idea was you had to meet highest priority needs before you could concentrate on the next highest priority.

So you'd be willing to risk your physical safety (priority #2) if you had unmet physiological needs such as food, water, or air.

Serving that angry customer is the lowest priority for humans, sitting at #5, self-actualization. According to Maslow's Hierarchy, we can only commit to doing this if our higher priority needs are being met.

 

Meeting Higher Priority Needs First

In my book, Getting Service Right, I shared a story about Paul. 

He was working in a nightclub's office when he received a call from an angry customer. The customer had apparently been contacted by his credit card company about a fraudulent charge and he assumed that someone at the nightclub had stolen his credit card number.

Here's an excerpt:

At first Paul tried his best to be helpful, but he quickly realized the man just wanted to vent. The customer's repeated accusations, "Your server stole my credit card number" and "You guys need to be more careful," soon wore thin. As Paul explained, "I could feel my blood pressure going up. I could feel my face get flush. I felt like, 'Don't accuse my coworker of doing something that you don't know that they did.' There are a million ways that credit card numbers get stolen. It was so frustrating to me."

Paul found it difficult to serve this customer because his #4 need, esteem, was being challenged. The desire to be awesome at customer service (self-actualization) took a back seat to a strong desire to avoid further insult.

It's even worse in other companies.

Paul actually liked his coworkers and felt a need to stand up for the server he felt was falsely accused. This suggests his #3 need, love and belonging, was being met in the workplace. Paul felt a part of the team.

But what if he didn't?

I encountered one of these employees on a recent trip to the pet store. This particular chain is infamous for constantly rearranging merchandise, so you can't find what you're looking for from one visit to the next.

An employee was helping me locate a certain brand of dog food when she started to vent. "I guess they [the pet chain's management] just want you to wander around so you'll shop more," she said. 

Notice the use of the word, "They." 

She didn't feel part of the team. Her sense of identity, at least at work, wasn't strongly attached to her employer. She clearly felt embarrassed and frustrated by a corporate policy and took steps to distance herself from it.

How could she possibly provide great customer service when she didn't care?

 

Take Action

Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs helps explain the old adage, "Happy employees lead to happy customers."

Many leaders make the mistake of using incentives and gimmicky programs to motivate their employees. Research shows employees don't actually have a motivation problem. The real issue is de-motivation.

Employees want to do a great job, but many feel they can't. 

Customer service leaders can do several things to overcome this challenge, foster a sense of team unity, and fulfill employees' need for love and belonging:

  1. Create a customer service vision that provides a unifying purpose.

  2. Make it easier for employees to achieve the vision.

  3. Work together as a team to solve common problems.

You can take action too if you're an individual contributor.

While writing The Service Culture Handbook, I discovered many companies with customer-focused cultures have a peer recognition program. Coworkers recognize each other for delivering outstanding service that aligns with the company's vision.

You can do this even if you don't have a formal program.

Take a moment to recognize your coworkers for their efforts. Go out of your way to build positive and supportive workplace relationships. This will help make your organization a better place to work and it will become even easier to serve your customers.

Insider Perspectives: Brent Abshire on Disaster Planning

Brent Abshire, Earthcare Management

Brent Abshire, Earthcare Management

Is your business ready for a disaster?

A disaster has the potential to have an extreme negative impact on your customers, your employees, and the future of your business.

You might experience a technical disaster, such as the computer malfunctions that have caused several airlines to ground their flights. It could be a PR disaster, such as the one many companies have recently faced when they got caught in a political crossfire.

Or your business could experience a natural disaster, such as the flood that submerged parts of Houston, Texas in April 2016.

Earthcare Management, a full-service landscape management company, suffered millions of dollars in damage when its office and equipment yard flooded.

I spoke with Brent Abshire, Earthcare Management's President and Owner, to hear how he and his team handled the disaster, avoided layoffs, and came back stronger than ever.

Q: When did you first learn your business had been flooded?

"It started raining pretty heavily on Sunday, but it wasn't until Monday when the flooding happened. I woke up Monday morning, turned on the local news and saw an aerial view of my shop from the station's helicopter!

Photo courtesy of Brent Abshire

Photo courtesy of Brent Abshire

"I could tell the shop was flooded from the picture on television, but I didn't know how bad it was going to be."

 

Q: What did you do once you learned about the flooding?

"There was flooding in the streets around the neighborhood where I live, so I was stuck at home on Monday and couldn't get in to the office.

"I knew it was probably going to be pretty bad, though, so I immediately started making calls and hunting down replacement vehicles and equipment. I called the John Deere guy and ordered about 100 machines [lawnmowers, etc.]. I called my truck guy and rented 65 trucks. I ordered about 1,000 tons of gravel rock to put down in our equipment yard because I knew that was going to be a mess too.

"I was able to meet with my management team on Tuesday by mid-day. The shop was still flooded, so they came over to my house and we made a plan to assess the damage, clean everything up, and get back up and running.

"We were able to get to the shop by Wednesday. We had to wade in the last 1/4 mile because there was still water.

Photo courtesy of Brent Abshire

Photo courtesy of Brent Abshire

"My insurance agent came out to help assess the damage. The office itself was a total loss, but we started cleaning up and salvaging whatever equipment, trailers, and tools that we could.

"I had the whole family help. Friends came and helped us too."

 

Q: How did the flooding impact your clients?

"When I met with my management team on Tuesday after the flood, we targeted the following Monday to get back to our normal operations.

"Many of our landscape management clients experienced the same flooding we did, so their properties had a lot of debris. We called them and said, 'We can't mow, but we can pick up trash and help you get cleaned up.' They were happy to hear from us.

"By Thursday, we got about 25 rented trucks in, so we were able to start sending out crews to our client sites to help them get cleaned up. We kept at it through Sunday while other employees stayed at the shop pulling equipment out, putting new rock in the yard, and cleaning up tools.

Photo courtesy of Brent Abshire

Photo courtesy of Brent Abshire

"We were able to resume our normal schedules by the next Monday."

 

Q: Disasters like this can have a big impact on employees who risk losing their jobs when there's no work. What happened to your employees?

"Nobody lost their job. We actually grew as a result of the flood.

"My employees are really committed. It was a team effort throughout the whole process. I think they thought, 'If the flood didn't stop this guy, we'll do anything!' I know many of our employees had friends or family members who lost jobs because the place where they worked flooded too, so it probably made an impact that we got people working so quickly.

"We're also contractually obligated to serve our clients, so it was very important that we keep our deals."

 

Q: Were you able to learn anything from this experience to help you prepare for another disaster in the future?

"We did some research and learned that once rainfall reaches 8 inches, we should start evacuating the equipment yard. The office is pretty seamless since we have offsite backups for the computers. What really hurts is losing our equipment because that's what we take out every day to make money. 

"A couple of weeks ago, we did a small-scale simulation where we practiced a procedure for moving vehicles and equipment out of the yard. It went well, so now we're going to run a large-scale simulation.

"The plan is to practice our disaster plan one or two times per year and never stop practicing, so everyone will know what to do if this happens again."

Inside Gallup's New Employee Engagement Report

Employee engagement efforts are stuck in a rut.

That's the verdict from Gallup's 2017 State of the American Workplace Report. The latest study pegs employee engagement at just 33 percent among American workers. 

That's not much of a bump compared to Gallup's 2013 report:

Gallup's report also noted that the best organizations have an average employee engagement rate of 70 percent! 

So what do the results tell us? And, what actionable advice can we take away from Gallup's research? You can download the full report, or you can read the highlights below.

 

Defining Engagement

You'd expect Gallup to explicitly call out a definition early in the report, but it doesn't. In fact, I couldn't find a specific definition anywhere. 

You can't improve something if you can't define it.

Imagine you wanted to be a football player because all of your friends were playing football. You spent a summer lifting weights. You practiced blocking and tackling. You threw passes and ran routes. Then, on the first day of tryouts, you arrive at the field and realize that everyone meant soccer. 

Yeah, it's like that. So here's my definition of employee engagement:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee deliberately contributes to organizational success.

This means companies need to do two things to engage their employees:

  1. Make sure employees understand how the organization defines success.

  2. Secure employees' commitment to help.

Gallup's report does shed some light on a few issues that can help us improve.

 

Challenge #1: Culture

Jim Clifton, Gallup's Chairman and CEO, calls out culture as a primary culprit in the report's opening statement:

The very practice of management no longer works.

One of his top recommendations is to focus employees beyond just collecting a paycheck and build a culture of purpose.

I've spent the fast few years researching organizations with highly engaged employees for my new book, The Service Culture Handbook (April 4, 2017). Every single one I looked at had a clear, customer-focused purpose statement called a Customer Service Vision.

For example, Publix is one of the top-rated supermarkets in the country. Their customer service vision?

Where Shopping is a Pleasure

Think about the simplicity of that statement. Every Publix employee knows their job is to make shopping more enjoyable for their customers.

Once every employee commits to the same purpose, a culture is born. You can use this step-by-step guide to create your own customer service vision. 

 

Challenge #2: Ineffective Management

Only 21 percent of people who responded to Gallup's engagement survey agreed that their performance is well-managed.

My research clearly shows employees have a de-motivation problem. New employees start their jobs full of hope and promise until management sucks the spirit out of them by making it difficult for them to succeed.

Here are some top management challenges according to Gallup's report:

  • Unclear or misaligned expectations

  • Ineffective or infrequent feedback

  • Unfair evaluation practices

Let's go back to the definition of employee engagement. An engaged employee is committed to organizational success.

It's awfully tough to be committed if the definition of success is a moving target, your boss isn't giving you feedback on how to achieve it, or your boss isn't evaluating your performance based on your actual achievements.

Here are some more stunning findings:

  • Only 30 percent strongly agree their manager involves them in goal setting.

  • Just 44 percent strongly agree they can link their goals to organizational goals.

  • Only 41 percent strong agree their job description matches their actual work.

 

Conclusion

It's a damning report, but employee engagement doesn't need to be a huge mystery. Great managers make sure their employees can answer three questions:

  1. What is our customer service vision?

  2. What does it mean?

  3. How can I personally contribute?

Lessons from the Overlook: How Standardization Drives Service

Note: Lessons from The Overlook is a monthly update on lessons learned from owning a vacation rental property in the Southern California mountain town of Idyllwild. It's a hands-on opportunity to apply some of the techniques I advise my clients to use. You can find past updates here.

When my wife, Sally, and I purchased The Overlook, we had a lot of big ideas.

We wanted our place to be unique, with a lot of value-added touches that would wow our guests and make them want to return over and over again.

So we brainstormed a list of ideas:

  • Leave bottle of local wine on the counter as a guest amenity?

  • Give our guests free firewood in the wintertime?

  • Put high quality toiletries in all the bathrooms?

It turned out the best way to wow our guests was to do none of these things. The biggest reason wasn't cost, although cost certainly was important.

It was standardization. Here's why standardization is crucial to service.

Photo credit: Jon Millhouse

Photo credit: Jon Millhouse

Fear of Service Failure

When we thought about extras at The Overlook, we also worried about service failure.

In their outstanding book, The Effortless Experience, authors Matt Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi make a compelling argument that service failures have a much greater impact on customers than wow moments.

That's because people naturally tend to have a negativity bias. Negative experiences are much more memorable and are more likely to sway future behavior than positive ones.

What happens if one guest gets a bottle of wine, tells people about it, but the bottle of wine fails to appear for the next guest?

What happens if we promise free firewood (so guests don't bring any of their own), but the firewood isn't there when guests arrive late on a cold winter night?

What happens if the fancy toiletries aren't replenished and the bathrooms look like the last guest just left a few half-empty bottles behind that weren't removed by the cleaning crew?

We were concerned about all of these potential failures because we knew we'd need to rely on our property manager to handle any extras. Our property management company has a well-defined, standardized process for servicing the 40+ homes it manages.

Asking them to change their routine for just us would be begging for trouble.

 

How Variables Create Failure

Think about cleaning and re-stocking a vacation cabin from an operations perspective. The easiest way to ensure consistency is to standardize.

  1. Write standard procedures.

  2. Train everyone to follow those procedures. 

  3. Stock standard replenishment items (paper towels, toilet paper, soap, etc.)

Our property management company has it down to a science. There are even standard sheets and towels so linens can quickly be replaced without having to launder everything onsite.

Now, imagine changing everything for just one house. 

The procedures change. You need to remind employees to follow the different procedures, and you need to remind them again because the same employees might not service the house each time. You also need to stock special supplies and make sure you don't run out for just that one cabin.

All of those variables are a recipe for things "falling through the cracks." 

Even big companies struggle with this. For example, extreme variability is one of the reasons why McDonald's has struggled with service and food quality.

 

The Standardization Cure

You're much more likely to deliver consistently excellent service if you can standardize your service delivery process. With that in mind, we couldn't just consider our own cabin. We had to think of it from our property manager's perspective. (This is an important aspect of partnership, a topic I covered last month.)

All of our original ideas required our property manager to deviate from a standard procedure.

So we re-thought our approach and came up with some new ideas that didn't require our property management company to alter its normal routine:

Idea #1: Don't charge for snow removal. Standard procedure was for our property manager to shovel and plow snow at each cabin whenever a snow storm hit. It's a required safety item, but most cabin owners charge for this service. We decided to pay for it ourselves.

Idea #2: Stock back-up dishes. Most vacation rental guests expect a few cracked plates or mis-matched dishes. We put in an entire set of matching dishes and then added some back-ups to our owner's closet. Once a month, we inspect the cabin ourselves and replace any broken or missing items so the kitchen feels fully-stocked. (Many guests have commented on this.)

Idea #3: Stock extra kitchen items. The Overlook has four bedrooms, so it's really geared for families or couples traveling together. That means they'll cook a few nice meals in the cabin, so we made sure the kitchen was stocked with items you don't normally find in a vacation rental: a crockpot, extra tupperware, a full set of pots and pans, and even an apron for the chef. It turns out this has become one of the biggest delights for our guests!

Idea #4: Remove clutter. We talked to many people who regularly rent vacation cabins and one of their top pet peeves was clutter. They'd say, "How can I put my stuff somewhere if the owner's stuff is all over the place?!" So we went through the entire cabin and kept every table, counter, nightstand, and chest of drawers as clutter-free as possible.

Idea #5: Provide a nice guest book. The typical vacation cabin has a ratty three-ring binder that contains all of the house rules, instructions for using various items, and information about the local area. We spent a few extra dollars and created a beautiful bound book on Shutterfly. It's a classier way to share the same information.

In his new book, Kaleidoscope, customer service guru Chip Bell calls these items value-unique. They don't necessarily cost a lot of money, but they make The Overlook standout compared to other options.

We've been lucky so far. It's been booked nearly every weekend.